Exploration and adventures on our Moon have been around for a while but there is a special place for beautiful women who come from that lifeless rock. The early SF novel, H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901), is aptly named since two men go to the Moon and discover insect-like creatures. No women are along with Cavor and Bedford. No surprise that changed when it was filmed in 1964.
In the case of that film the woman was brought to the Moon. The stories that follow offer women originally from the Moon. Adventure fiction as well as Pulp SF have offered exotic gals from many locations such as the sea and jungle with titles like The Girl in the Golden Atom, The Thought Girl, The Shadow Girl, The Sea Girl and The Snow Girl. And that’s just Ray Cummings.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that one of the first writers of the exotic Moon Girl is Edgar Rice Burroughs. He had beautiful queens on Mars with Dejah Thoris, inside the Earth with Dian the Beautiful and Princess Duare on Venus. Tarzan reverses this with Jane Porter finding her beau in the jungle. It is simply more exotic and fantastic if your significant other comes from Vepaja on Amtor than from Scranton, Pennsylvania. (Not that beautiful women don’t come from there.)
The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs (Argosy All-Story Weekly, May 5-June2, 1923) offers us the first expedition to the Mars, at once sabotaged by the dissident Orthis, and ending up on the Moon. On the satellite, the wholesome Julian meets Nah-ee-lah:
…By earthly standards, she appeared a girl of about eighteen, with hair of glossy blackness, that suggested more the raven’s wing than aught else and a skin of almost marble whiteness, slightly tinged with a creamy shade. Only in the color of her skin, did she differ from earthly women in appearance, except that she seemed far more beautiful than they. Such perfection of features seemed almost unbelievable.
Of course, living on a harsh Moon with little to eat and less air makes a gal look her best. The artists who have rendered Nah-ee-lah have preferred to paint her on the back of a Va-Gas, the centaur-like creatures of the Moon.
Julian brings his Moon gal back to Earth with him but Orthis joins forces with the evil Kalkars (ERB’s version of Bolsheviks) and they come too. The second book, The Moon Men, follows Julian’s reincarnated soul as it travels through the ages and political struggles with the descendants of the Kalkars. Despite the name, it has nothing more to do with the Moon.
Maza of the Moon (Argosy, December 21, 1929-January 11, 1930) by Otis Adelbert Kline was one of Kline’s ERB knock-offs for Argosy. In a contest for a million dollars, an inventor shoots a missile at the Moon. Unfortunately, the Moon fires back, starting a space war. When Ted Dustin and Roger Sanders see Maza for the first time via space phone ERB-ish description follows:
She was not large–a scant five feet in height, he judged–but there was a certain dignity in her bearing which somehow made her appear taller. The golden glory that was her hair, dressed in a style new and strange to the inventor, was held by a band of platinum-like metal powdered with glistening jewels. Her clothing, if judged by earthly standards, was not clothing at all. Gleaming meshes of white metal, woven closely together, formed a light, shimmering garment that covered though it revealed the lines of her shapely breasts, slender waist, and lissom hips, leaving arms, shoulders and legs bare. A jeweled dagger hung from a chain-like belt about her waist, and a huge ruby blazed on the index finger of her left hand. On her feet were sandals, apparently constructed from the white metal.
Ted builds a spaceship and goes to the Moon. He meets Maza and learns that the Moon has two warring factions. Ted joins Maza’s side and helps to win freedom for the Moon People.
There was a comic book adaptation of the book called Rocket to the Moon (1951) with a script by Walter B. Gibson of The Shadow fame.
“The Moon Woman” (Amazing Stories, November 1929) by Minna Irving has a scientist, Professor James Hicks, kept in suspended animation with an injection until far in the future he meets Rosaria. She is a half-Lunarian girl. In the future, Moon people come to earth and inter-breed. Hicks falls in love with her. Too bad he wakes up only one day after his sleeping injection and it is all a dream. The story doesn’t actually take place on the Moon and doesn’t actually take place at all. Blah.
“The Lady of the Moon” (Astounding Stories, September 1935) by Philip M. Fisher has another professor, Kimball Jamison, who invents a super telescope with a viewscreen. Pointing the device at the Moon, he sees a beautiful woman on a grassy lawn. He falls madly in love with her. Jamison disappears. His colleague, the narrator, wonders if he ever made it to the Moon and if the woman reciprocated his love. Oddly, he doesn’t use Jamison’s device to look and see if any of this happens. I have to think Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter must have been some of the inspiration here. Fisher is better known for his sea stories.
“Liline the Moon Girl” (Amazing Stories, May 1940) by Edmond Hamilton begins with rocket scientist, David Madden, and his partner, Theron Leigh, finishing work on Moonflower II, for a trip to the Moon. The ship is stolen by Graff, an agent of the evil Central Emperor (Hitler). The two are forced to take Moonflower I, an inferior deathtrap of an earlier ship. Madden is glad to be headed for the Moon because he has been receiving telepathic messages from Liline, one of two remaining members of the Lunarian race. The two, Liline and her sister, Tula, guard the mysterious power of The Flame. Graff desires the equivalent of nuclear power for his Fuhrer.
Liline makes her appearance riding on an unusual mount:
Liline–riding on the back of the enormous flying lizard. He saw her, now, as the lizard curved fearfully away…Phantom moon-girl of his dreams, at last standing real and living before him! Her soft, childlike white face clear and beautiful now as it had been in the dreams, her dark eyes pulsing with strange emotion. She was garbed in a short white robe of silken stuff, belted by a jewelled girdle. Her black hair was tossed back from her broad, high forehead, her slender, youthfully rounded arms and legs bare.
Hamilton is clearly writing in the A. Merritt mode, much more familiar in the early work of his friend, Jack Williamson. Hamilton gives us a mixed happy ending with Tula and Graff dying and David and Liline coming to Earth together. The Moon civilization dies along with the secret of atomic fire but Madden and his new bride are happy enough.
Conclusion
I think we can all agree that women have been liberated from the position of hero’s prize (or the Wellsian equivalent, not present at all) in most Science Fiction. But not all old SF writers added female arm candy to their stories of the Moon. Jack Williamson’s ‘The Moon Era” doesn’t have the traditional brass bra-wearing sidechick. He offers us the Mother, the last of her race and a character that inspired Robert A. Heinlein. For more on this story, go here.
Just as “the frail” has vanished, so has the Moon as a location for air-filled adventure Sci-Fi. We know far too much about the Moon now to inhabit it with beauties or beasties in the Burroughian mold. ERB wasn’t the first to visit the Moon (not in 1920!) but most tales of trips to the Moon did not include lunar lovelies. Jules Verne never lands, only circles the satellite. George Griffith took a newly wed couple there in A Honeymoon in Space (1901) but Zaidie was from Earth, a visitor. From Lucian to Cyrano, early voyages were focused on the marvels, not the dating opportunities of our celestial companion. It took the Pulps (and Hollywood too) to make the Moon a place for romance.
